


Cyclical Cynicism

by orelseatlastsheunderstoodit



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, Post-Episode: s01e06 Dalek, Post-Time War (Doctor Who), The Doctor hates the Architect, Time War (Doctor Who), Time War Angst (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24296242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit/pseuds/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit
Relationships: The Doctor (Doctor Who) & Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	1. The Undertaker

The Doctor opened his eyes and found darkness. He blinked several times. Nothing. Had he been struck blind? He went to wave a hand in front of his face, but something held his arms tight. Bound somehow, and in the dark. Now, how did that happen?

They’d been on the TARDIS, him and Rose and that Adam they’d picked up from Van Statten’s bunker--

“Where’s Rose?”

“Where’s Rose?” a voice mimicked, barely muffling a snickering sneer. “Who’s Rose? My dear Doctor, you’ve been dreaming for far too long.”

He began rifling through his mental files for someone, anyone, he knew of that could do this. The only ones he could think of were dead along with Gallifrey. And he couldn’t place the accent--American? Northern? Stebblin? “Dreaming?”

“Of course! You made Rose up, don’t you remember? Reality’s far too _real_ , so you imagined her to make life more _bearable_ , more _comfortable_ for you, to escape it all,” the voice said. “So that you could keep on running. You’re good at that.”

“At running? Sure, run all the time,” the Doctor answered. The Universe was just one big Treadmill. “Good for cardiovascular health. Now, you are?”

A ripple of laughter. “Oh, right. Forgot to introduce myself.” A click of fingers, and the darkness brightened, almost imperceptibly. “I’m the Undertaker.”

The Doctor squinted at the figure before him, a mostly shadowy shape. Masculine, it seemed, and about his own height. Difficult to tell anything else, really. “Funny name.”

“Not as funny as yours.” The Undertaker gave a short laugh. “ _Doctor_. As if the universe needs more of those when there’s a war on.”

“What war?”

“ _The_ war, you great big dunce,” the Undertaker said. “The Time War. The only war that matters. The war you can’t ever escape. Not really. Not even by imagining yourself a little friend.”

Something cold slithered down the Doctor’s back. “Rose is real.”

“Of _course_ she is. But just to you. Not to anyone else. Not to me, certainly.”

“And how do you know about the Time War? Everyone who fought in that--”

“Is dead except for you, I know. Boo-hoo, the Doctor’s so alone, he can’t feel anyone else out there in the universe. You really are thick, aren’t you?”

“So educate me,” the Doctor said. “Tell me how you come to be here, wherever this is.”

“Oh, so you can try to escape while I monologue? Nice try, Mr. Obvious.” The Undertaker shifted his position, his shadowy shape moving to the side and coming closer to where the Doctor was held. 

“Just ‘The Doctor’, if you please,” the Doctor said.

A nasty chuckle. “Full of jokes, aren’t you?”

“Usually. I’m most fond of physical humor. Met a young Charlie Chaplin backstage after one of his performances as Billy the page in _Sherlock Holmes_ on the West End--”

“I do not need another one of your travelogues.”

“What do you need?”

“You asked me how I got here,” the Undertaker said, sidestepping the question. “It’s not a pleasant story.”

“I’m certain I’ve heard worse.”

“I was in the war, you know. Fought some of the biggest battles, brought down the worst Dalek mutations, lost the most of anyone out there.”

“I--”

“Shut it, Doctor. You’re not _special_ when it comes to suffering in the War,” the Undertaker said. “If anything you get off easy. You know the Time Lords as well as I do, and believe me, they sent me into the worst of it. The fall of Arcadia, the Ripples of Marshfield Five, the Burning of the End, and the Beginnings. Back and forth, the war an open wound in the web of time. And me in the middle of it.”

“Then how come I never met you?”

“Invisible TARDIS. Not all of us go swanning about the universe like we own it.” 

Once the Doctor got out of this, he just had to find a way to make the TARDIS invisible. She’d love to figure out how to do a trick like that. “And you in the middle of it. What then?”

The Undertaker took a deep breath, let it out. Sounded like he had a bypass system like his own, if he judged the sounds of it correctly. “So there I was, wearing what, my eighth? face--and I was captured by the Daleks. Tortured. _Transformed_.”

“You regenerated?”

“Believe me, this was no _renewal_. I woke in my TARDIS, disoriented, in pain. For the first time in eons the web of time was no longer aflame, no longer screaming in the agonies wrought on it by the Daleks, by the Time Lords, but I could not rest. The war is forever, and I had to find who took the war from me. And it took me a long time, but I finally found out.”

“Let me guess, it was me.”

“Winner winner chicken dinner,” the Undertaker snarled. An echo of phantom applause rippled out from wherever they stood. “Who am I without the war? What can I do now? Where can I go? Who am I without the war?”

“That’s up to you,” the Doctor said, subtly trying to get his hand into his pocket. If he could just get his sonic screwdriver out, he’d be able to locate the door and get out of here. Assuming, of course, that this place had a door. Not all places did.

“No, no, no,” the Undertaker said. “So I decided that I would find you and make you pay for taking the war from me, when it was with me for so long, when it was all I had for the longest time, to pay the Daleks back for what they did to me, what they did to our people, what they did to Gallifrey.”

The Doctor knew it was a stupid time to say the next thing he’d say, but since that was sometimes his modus operandi, he did it anyway. “It wasn’t the Daleks who did that to Gallifrey.”

“Oh, and who was it?” the Undertaker asked. “Was it the Master? Drax? The Monk? The Rani? Someone else with a ridiculous title they adorned themselves with? Was it the Time Lords themselves?”

“Me. It was me,” the Doctor said. What a wrench to say it out aloud, to admit it to this being who could very well be the only other survivor of Gallifrey, who deserved to hate him for eternity. “I did it to stop the war. Got rid of Gallifrey. Put my hand on a big red button and ended it all. Don’t ask me for details, I don’t remember them.”

The Undertaker’s voice was nearly a growl. “You. You did this. You destroyed Gallifrey, and you took away the war, and you kept vengeance from me. No wonder you prefer to pretend that your happy little life is all that you’ve ever been living, that it all starts with you and nothing came before and nothing will come after. But you live in reality just like I do, Doctor, even if you won’t admit it to yourself.”

“I did not imagine Rose,” the Doctor said. 

The Undertaker laughed. “Sure you did! You found her corpse in that shop you blew up, you pitied the poor ape that got in the way of the Autons, and you pretended that you’d saved her instead, that you grabbed her hand and whispered ‘Run’, that you’d whisked her off to all of time and space. But you didn’t. You didn’t.”

“Prove it.”

“The burden of _proof_ doesn’t fall on me,” the Undertaker said. “You’re the one with the delusions. If Rose Tyler _were_ real, then, tell me, Doctor, what would she be doing _right now_?”

“Finding a way to rescue me. And she will.”

\--

Rose Tyler was in a tizzy. Well, not exactly a tizzy, but close enough that the word felt right. The Doctor was unconscious, and Adam wasn’t taking it well.

In fact, he seemed to be more in a tizzy than she was. “What are we going to do?” he asked. “I didn’t know that thing would do that! How do we get it off him?”

‘That thing’ was something that looked like a virtual reality headset. The Doctor had taken it, it had glowed a deep purplish-red, and then clamped onto his face. He’d fallen, and she couldn’t budge him. Couldn’t get him to respond. His hearts were still beating, and he was still breathing, but that was about it. It was something, though. Something was better than nothing.

Rose swallowed the dread lurking at the back of her throat. “We’ll find a way,” she said. _We have to_ was left unsaid, but it lingered in the air anyway. How would the Doctor approach this?

She clapped her hands twice. “Now, what do we know?”

“That thing is on his head and won’t come off,” Adam said.

“Yeah, but beyond that,” Rose answered. “It was from your stash, right?”

“Yes.”

“And it looks like a VR headset.”

“Yes.” 

“But we don’t know if it _is_ a VR headset,” Adam said. “What if it’s a weapon like those other things I had?”

“It’s definitely a weapon,” Rose said. “But we don’t know what sort.”

“We both held it before he did, and we’re not the ones laid out on the floor.”

“That could be important. I wonder if the TARDIS can scan him for alien tech or something like that. If we know where it came from, or who made it, we can figure out how to stop it.”

“You live here and you don’t know if the ship can do that?”

“It’s a big ship,” Rose said, shrugging. She placed a hand on the console, something causing the tips of her fingers to tingle. Whenever she did this, it felt like home, like something or someone was calling to her from a long distance. “Do you have a way to do that?”

With a slight hum, a light beamed out of somewhere and ran over the Doctor. The center column of the console flashed when the beam went over the object, and an image popped up on the screen.

Rose took the screen and pulled it down to her height. “Planet of origin: Unknown,” she read. “Huh. I wonder why--”

“Fat lot of use this ship is,” Adam said.

“Don’t you insult her,” Rose answered. “She’s doing her best.” She turned back to the screen. “Manufacturer: Unknown, though it says that it seems similar to tech made by a man named Magpie. Odd name.”

“Who cares about his name? How can we get it off him?”

“Recommended course of action: Remove item.” Rose frowned at the console. “But that’s what we’re trying to do. Don’t you have any suggestions?”

No response from the TARDIS. Sometimes Rose wished the TARDIS could speak in a way that she could understand.

“So if we don’t know where it came from, and we don’t know who made it, and we don’t know why it chose him--”

“Can you scan it for a time signature?” Rose asked.

The beam slid over the Doctor’s supine form. “Time of origin: Classified.”

“Classified?” Adam asked. “How can _when_ something came from be classified?”

“There was a war, and we lost,” Rose whispered. She looked at the headset, then back at the screen. “Is this a weapon from the war the Doctor fought in?”

“There’s wars in space? No one said anything about wars in space,” Adam said.

“Where’d ya think all the space weapons came from?” Rose answered.

“I...never really thought about it.” Adam looked like he’d accidentally gotten off at the wrong Tube station on the other side of the city. Rose couldn’t blame him for it; everybody was new to something at one time or another.

“Your A levels never addressed where goods come from?” At Adam’s hurt look, Rose backpedaled. “I’m teasing. Look, it’s a different way of thinking out here, and it takes some time to get used to it. You will. Get used to it, I mean.”

“Sure, sure,” Adam said. “If we can get anywhere without the Doctor.”

“Without the Doctor?”

“If we can’t get it off him, I mean.”

“We’re gonna get it off him,” Rose said. “We’re not even entertaining the possibility that we won’t.”

“Okay, so then what do we do?”

“It’s a machine, so it’s got to have a power source of some sort. So we turn it off.”

“How?”

Rose crossed the room and knelt next to the Doctor. She stared at the device, tried not to think about how the goggles reminded her of old-timey gas masks, and looked for an off switch. There, a button on the side. She went to press it.

“Wait!”

She paused, looked up at Adam. “What?”

“What if it doesn’t turn it off?”

“Then we look for the next solution.” Rose pressed the button.


	2. Depressed Button

The Undertaker clicked his fingers again, and two large windows opened. Outside them, the war raged. Distant points of light flickered, went out, rekindled. He swept his arm toward the view. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“War isn’t beautiful,” the Doctor said.

“Of course you’d say that,” the Undertaker spat. “But here, at a remove of a few thousand years, give or take an eon or two, it’s sublime, this dance between life and death, between creation and destruction, the weaving and the unraveling of time. It’s divine, and? You and I? Gods.”

“I’m a poor god,” the Doctor said. “No one should worship me.”

“And the Daleks? What do they think of you? _You would make a good Dalek_ , it said.”

Something cold settled into the pit of the Doctor’s stomach. “How do you know about that?”

“I have my ways,” the Undertaker said.

“I am not a Dalek,” the Doctor said.

“Of course not. But you believe you’re the last of the Time Lords, right? And what a Time Lord you are. Pretending to be on adventures with some little human, as if they’re important enough for us gods.”

“Again, not a god,” the Doctor said. “The Daleks weren’t, either, nor the Time Lords. But they’re all gone now. So even if they were what you say, why would it matter?”

“It would matter because I could bring my people _back_ ,” the Undertaker said. “The Daleks would be gone, and Gallifrey would be there--”

“And Rassilon would be there, ready to zap anyone who opposed him, ready to destroy the universe to save Gallifrey. Is that really how you want your people to be? Alone in the universe, with no one and nowhere else to see?”

“If they’re alive, nothing else matters.”

The Doctor shook his head. “No.”

“No?”

“I’ve got to accept that they’re gone, that there’s nothing I can do to bring them back. They’re gone out of the universe and I can’t sense them anymore. Time to move on, and you should, too.”

“And that makes you a _coward_ ,” the Undertaker said, his voice a tight whisper. “If you’re not going to do what it takes to bring them back, then you’re a coward. A bloody coward who should do the universe a favor and clear _out_.”

The Doctor grinned. “Oh, it’s my punishment to keep on living, or hadn’t you heard? I’m awfully lucky when it comes to things like this.” If there was anything enemies hated, it was deliberate cheerfulness in the face of doom. He was an old hand at that.

He wriggled once more and got a hand free. Now, if he could reach the sonic and signal Rose somehow. She and the TARDIS had to be around somewhere. “You never said where we were?”

“Exactly where we’ve always been,” the Undertaker said. “And this is where we’ll always be.” He clicked his fingers again, and the viewports snapped shut. “In the dark.”

“Where’d you get your sense of melodrama, the Daleks or the Time Lords?”

“The Daleks have no sense of melodrama.”

The Doctor laughed. “Have you ever _met_ Daleks?”

“Stop trying to make me your friend. You won’t succeed, Doctor,” the Undertaker said.

“Still worth trying.”

“You think so?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“It’s right, and it’s kind,” the Doctor said. “And if there’s anything Rose has reminded me about, it’s that being kind is important, that it takes more bravery to face the world with a friendly face than a scowl. Rose is the one who reminded me why being the Doctor is important, why looking out for those who are stuck out on the margins matters. Rose--”

“Isn’t real, I keep telling you that. Rose, Rose, Rose,” the Undertaker sneered. “Who cares about the little people the great powers trample on? _Nobody_ . Who cares that there are people without voices, people without hope? _Nobody_. They’re just nameless casualties in an unfeeling and unkind universe. Why keep caring when there’s no point?”

“Kindness is the point,” the Doctor said. “Being kind means you care, like Rose does. She cares so much about everyone. And she’s not the only friend I’ve had like that, and--”

“Kindness is _pointless_ . Being kind is _pointless_ . Caring makes you _weak_ . And if you care about anything you have to care about everything, and you can’t fix everything, even with eternity and temporal loops to aid you. There’s always another betrayal, another vicious villain, another callous corporation, another corrupt government bringing boots down onto their people’s necks, there’s always greed and cruelty and a thousand pointless pains, there’s slings and arrows and a million misfortunes for anyone who didn’t happen to be lucky. Every living being is just an animated corpse, flickering candles on the stage of life, waiting for the moment that they’re snuffed out into nothinginess. They suffer and they die, and nobody cares, so kindness is _pointless_.”

“It’s not. Rose--”

“Rose isn’t real!” The Undertaker yelled, his hands and arms providing emphasis as he stalked closer to the Doctor. “Your relationship with her doesn’t exist! She’s a corpse you’ve attached meaning to, that’s it. You’ve tricked yourself into thinking that she exists because you need her to, you want her to. You’re so desperate to be liked that you’ve made up a friend who adores you, you’re so needy that you’d take someone who’s the relative age of a baby out into the universal maelstrom of strife and suffering despite the risk to her. You’d pretend all that danger and mischief just to hold somebody’s hand. You’re alone in the universe and _you deserve to be_.”

“Rose is real, I’m telling you that she is,” the Doctor insisted. But _did_ he protest too much? Rose was young, yes, when compared to a Time Lord who’d forgot his age half the time and lied about it the other half. Compared to humans in her era, though, she’d was nearly at a fourth of her life gone, if she were so lucky to reach a hundred years. Was it irresponsible of him to take her into all of time and space?

Was she real? Did she really care for him? Or had he merely made her up, a passing fancy in the lonely life of the last of the Time Lords?

“All your friends were walking corpses, and you know that’s all they’ll ever be,” the Undertaker said. “At some point they began, and at some point they stopped, and when did you notice? When did you see that it didn’t matter to you when and where they got off your frankly magnificent time ship? Was it when you abandoned Susan in a post-apocalyptic dystopia? Was it when the Time Lords took Zoe and Jamie from you? Was it when Jo ran off with that scientist? Was it when you dropped Sarah Jane off in the wrong town? Was it when Adric died? When Charley left you?”

“It matters to me,” the Doctor said. “They matter to me.”

“Do they? Or will you just keep running? Keep leaving them behind?”

Another hand free. Now for the elbows. “I don’t promise to keep my friends safe.”

“Oh, yes, you do. And if you don’t promise them, you promise their _mothers_.”

“You said Rose isn’t real. If Rose isn’t real, neither is Jackie.”

“You’ve imagined quite a universe inside your head. Definitely got some cowboys in there. So you gave your little pet a mother. A boyfriend, too. How _noble_ of you, to imagine that they have existences apart from your own, that they don’t revolve around you and the wonders you show them. They’re nothing without you.”

“That’s not true.”

“But you’re not sure, are you?”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m sure or not,” the Doctor said. “What does matter is two things.”

“And what are those?”

“One, Rose will do anything to rescue me, and, two, I’ve got my screwdriver back.” The Doctor pulled free of the last restraint, brandishing the tool.

The Undertaker lunged forward, grabbed the Doctor’s wrist, his face close to the Doctor’s, too close to make sense of the features. “You won’t get away so easily.”

“I wouldn’t call this easy!”

\--

“Pressing the button didn’t do anything,” Adam said.

“Anything that we know of,” Rose answered, though she feared Adam might be right.

“What do we do now?”

“We think of another solution, like I said.”

“Yeah, but what? It didn’t turn off, we can’t get it loose from his face, and we don’t know how to fly this thing to somewhere that could get it off him. We’re stuck.”

“We don’t give up,” Rose said. She rocked back onto her heels, thinking hard. If that hadn’t been the on-off switch, or if said switch was inoperable, what other ways could they get the device to shut off? “What do you know about virtual reality?”

“We don’t know if--”

“Yeah, but let’s suppose it is,” Rose said. “If it is some sort of VR set, even some fancy souped-up space virtual reality set, how can we get it shut off?”

Adam frowned. “I thought you said it was a weapon.”

“Most anything can be a weapon,” Rose answered. “If used in the right way.” At Adam’s look of confusion, she continued, “Maybe it’s just a weapon against the Doctor, or his people. Maybe that’s why it didn’t affect us.”

“And why we can’t turn it off from the outside,” Adam said. He shook his head. “I’m not sure how we get out of this mess.”

“But you just said it!” Rose stood, leaned on the console, felt that gentle dangerous thrum under her fingertips. “If we can’t turn it off from the outside, maybe I can turn it off from the inside.”

“The inside? How would you--”

“Don’t worry,” Rose said. She gazed at the center of the console, smiling just a little bit. “You scanned it. Can you make a second one?”

Immediately, a second headset materialized within her reach. Rose scooped it up, its connection cords dangling off it. “See, I’ll connect this to the Doctor’s set, enter his virtual reality, and pull him out of it.”

Adam made some sort of nervous cough. “You can’t be serious.”

“Then you don’t know me very well,” she said, kneeling once more beside the Doctor and plugging the cords into the proper slots. Rose grinned. “Yet.”

She pulled the headset onto her face and flipped the switch.


	3. Fighting Demons

Light from an open doorway flooded into the dark room where the Doctor and the Undertaker struggled. The Doctor shielded his eyes as he took in the shape silhouetted by the light--a human shape, one that he recognized well enough to name. Hope rose in his hearts. “Rose!”

She stepped down from the doorway, which closed behind her, and crossed the room in a few short strides. “Miss me?”

The Doctor grinned. “Absolutely.” 

He shoved the Undertaker away. The being stumbled a few steps, then yelled, “No! She will not take you from me! She is not real!”

“Oh I’m very real,” Rose said. “And I’m here to get you to turn this simulation off.”

The Undertaker stepped into the room’s spotlight. Across a too-familiar face, a wicked smile curved. “A simulation, you say? Oh, you stupid stupid human, this isn’t a simulation. This isn’t virtual. This is no fantasy, no Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. This is reality.”

The Doctor stepped in front of Rose. If the Undertaker lunged, he’d be waiting to take the blow. “But you said--”

“I know what I said,” the Undertaker snapped. “I was lying, get used to it. Haven’t you realized who I am? It’s been kind of obvious, don’t you think?”

The Doctor had his suspicions but was loathe to voice them. It would be an acknowledgement of too much truth. “A stage magician?”

“No, you daft fool, I’m not--” The Undertaker shook his head. “I’m you. From a different timeline where what I told you happened to me _did_ happen, and I was imprisoned in this _device_ by the Daleks and popped back into this timeline to be found by you. My nemesis, the one who took the war away and left me desolate.”

“No,” the Doctor said. He felt Rose’s hand slip into his own; it was solid flesh, all right, calloused in places and soft in others, and her hand fit inside his like something he’d known once and forgotten, a dream undreamed and somehow recovered. An anchor in a storm he hadn’t quite weathered yet.

“No?”

“No,” he repeated. “Your story’s a lie, too. A clever one, a plausible one, I gotta say.” Truth burned like fire, but the Doctor pushed past the pain and sidestepped acknowledging truths better left buried. “You counted as I would and you know which words would cut the deepest. But here’s the thing: that means I know you. And that means you can be defeated.”

“No,” the Undertaker whispered.

“Doctor?” Rose asked.

“But, y’see, Rose, he _is_ me,” the Doctor admitted. “A funhouse mirror’s distortion, a doppelganger, an impostor, but me nonetheless, reflected back at me through the circuits of the device on my face. A monster made by the Time War.”

The Undertaker’s toothy grin gleamed. “A monster of your own making. Honestly, you think you’re a hero? Please, you’re nothing of the sort. A distortion? Hardly. Doctor, I’m the you who lurks in the corners of your vision, the person you see when you fancy yourself as better than the Daleks. And I’ll always be with you. ”

Rose shook her head, and her hand tightened on his. “Shut it, you. Doctor, look at me.”

He took his eyes off the Undertaker and lowered his gaze to his friend. “Rose, he’s right, you don’t know half--”

“I know you,” she said. “We were together at the end of the world and some places in between then and now, and we’ll be together after this. And the you I know is kind, and clever, and trying to do good. So when this guy--” Rose pointed at the Undertaker, who stood still and mute, gaping at them “--comes after you, you can tell him to swan off back to whatever hole he crawled out of. He says he’s you, that you did terrible things, and maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s something you gotta think about. But you can’t think about that person forever because you won’t _be_ that person forever. Who are you _now_ ? Who are you _today_ ? And who do you _want to be_?”

If the Doctor were a desert of despair, Rose’s words were a spring rain. “I want to be the Doctor.” He glanced at his doppelganger. “You’re nobody I want to be.”

The Undertaker sarcastically sighed. “Fine, I’ll go,” he said. “But I’ll back, just you wait and see.” He clicked his fingers and disappeared. The lights went up, revealing a room empty of anything except the Doctor, Rose, and a door with a sign reading ‘Exit’ above it.

“Fancy that,” Rose said, squeezing his hand lightly once more. “Let’s get out of here.”

“No argument from me whatsoever,” the Doctor answered.

They walked, hand in hand, out of the room.

\--

The Doctor pulled the device off his face, resisting the urge to melodramatically chuck it across the room. Beside him, Rose did the same. Well, the removing of a device; he didn’t know if she were resisting any melodramatic urges. “That was _fantastic_ , Rose.”

“What did she do?” Adam said. 

The Doctor stood, pulling Rose up with him. “Oh, nothing too dramatic,” he said. 

“Fought a demon,” Rose said, smiling one of her smiles that the Doctor had classified as ‘serious but teasing’. How she managed that, he still hadn’t quite figured out.

“A _what_ ?” Adam said. “Those are _real_?”

“More real than you’d think,” the Doctor said. “You kids want to see the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire?”

“Absolutely,” Rose said. “I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.”

Grinning, the Doctor stood, pulled Rose to her feet. He'd fight demons (his or anyone else's) every day, if he got to fight them alongside her.


End file.
